The government did not adequately consider the fragile state and the complexity of the adult social care infrastructure, in particular residential care buildings and equipment. Small organisations, that make up much of the sector, lacked the back office capacity to interpret continually updated guidance and outdated care home buildings struggled to isolate or group together infected residents and to accommodate wider infection control measures.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThere has been some positive progress in learning from these problems, with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) bolstering its social care capacity and expertise and the signaling of it as a priority area with the appointment not only of a specific director general but also a chief social care nurse.<\/p>\n
Following the first four months of the Covid-19 response, progress was made to plan for ongoing outbreaks in the short to medium term, for instance with the establishment of the social care taskforce in June 2020 and the decision to continue to provide PPE purchased centrally. The smoother subsequent rollout of vaccinations in social care settings pointed to improved collaboration between the government and social care partners, and the prioritisation of carers in the vaccination rollout was widely regarded as a positive step forward.<\/p>\n
Adelina Comas-Herrera, report co-author from the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said: \u201cThe pandemic has had a tragic impact on people who use social care and those who provide care, unpaid and paid. This has been a shared experience internationally but the evidence suggests that some countries were able to cope better than others. Our research shows that social care in England needs a system-wide reform to be able to respond not just to emergencies, but to the implications of longevity and competition for workforce with other sectors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Care Minister, Helen Whately, said: \u201cDuring the pandemic [the government] supported social care with \u00a32.9bn in specific Covid funding, sent out more than 230m Covid tests to care homes and prioritised social care for Covid vaccinations. We are committed to learning lessons from the pandemic and are investing up to \u00a37.5bn over the next two years to put social care on a stronger financial footing, help reduce waiting lists and alleviate workforce pressures.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nThe full report can be accessed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Structural weaknesses, unaddressed by successive governments, left social care struggling to provide the service and protection that people needed during the initial waves of Covid-19. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":4474,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25,28],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/integratedcarejournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/integratedcarejournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/integratedcarejournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integratedcarejournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integratedcarejournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4473"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/integratedcarejournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4524,"href":"https:\/\/integratedcarejournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473\/revisions\/4524"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integratedcarejournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/integratedcarejournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integratedcarejournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integratedcarejournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}